If you’ve never seen or written a resume before there are a few things you want to keep in mind:

it should be one page

it should contain your name, contact information, education, work experience, and, if applicable, skills and awards

it should be free of grammatical errors

I’m going to break down the resume section by section and tell you what goes in each. But remember, these are all suggestions. Ultimately, the way your resume looks is up to you. Feel free to tweak some of the sections, but don’t tweak them so much that they are no longer in resume format (if you have any questions regarding something specific on your resume, please leave a comment or shoot me a message).

Contact Information

Your name should be at the very top of the page, and bolded or 2 times the font size of the rest of your resume to make it stand out

Under that, include your phone number, address, and email address. If you are a college student you might want to list your current and permanent addresses on there. Also, make sure to use a professional email address.

Education

If you are in high school, list your high school name and the city that it is located in. If applicable, include your class rank and GPA. Also include your expected graduation date.

If you are in college, you will be including the same information, just adding your major.

Some employers do not require you to put your class rank or GPA, if they do not, I would suggest not to put it on there unless you have above a 3.5 GPA. This is just because you want to stand out from the pack, and unfortunately having less than than does not make you stand out.

Work Experience

You want to list this information in chronological order from your most recent work experience to the lest recent.

For each position, you should include the position you held, the company you worked for, the location of that company, and the dates that you worked there.

Under that information, you should list (using bullet points) your responsibilities, each one starting with an action verb.

Skills or Awards

If you have enough room on your resume (remember to keep it at one page) you might decide to put a skills or awards section, but it is not necessary.

You should include this section if you have specialized skills, like Photoshop, or web code, or something along those lines. Not if you know Microsoft Office, that should be a given.

If you have won any prestigious awards, such as a really competitive scholarship, or something that gave you state or national recognition that is relevant to the position that you are applying for, include those.

If you really have no idea where to start feel free to leave a comment below, tweet me, or email me.